In 1889, in a Prahran court, Jane Vaughan was sentenced to six months in prison for nicking umbrellas from a shop, and for stealing a dress from a house.
The Argus newspaper called her a “notorious old thief” and noted Vaughan had 53 prior convictions for petty offences.
Historian Sean Reynolds, who stumbled across the case while researching his passion for ghost signs – faded and defunct signs – wondered how Vaughan came to have such a record, and he went down a research rabbit hole.
In an 1859 article in The Age reporting Vaughan’s theft of a pair of boots, Vaughan was described as “an uncomely damsel with a black eye and other honorable marks”. She was sentenced to three months in jail.
Two years earlier, Vaughan, using the alias Jane Jamieson, received a one-month prison sentence for “keeping a disorderly house”.
Reynolds was taken aback by the harsh character judgment and punishments, and it prompted him to look into a different kind of ghost – marginalised women who are overlooked in history.
Reynolds is giving a talk at the Public Record Office of Victoria on February 19 called Names in the Margins about how women such as Vaughan were dismissed as villains or as immoral.
Reynolds came across Vaughan when looking up, in newspaper archive Trove, the long-defunct Moffitt drapery in Chapel Street, Prahran, whose name, or ghost sign survives.
He discovered that Vaughan once stole three umbrellas from the store.
Police, court and newspaper records showed that Vaughan, a Scottish immigrant, was once hospitalised after her husband beat her, and was often arrested for petty, drink-related offences.
In 1892 Vaughan, then middle-aged, but looking decades older, was photographed for a mugshot upon being arrested once again.
Reynolds speculates that prison may have represented to Vaughan “a roof over her head”.
One of the most tragic people Reynolds found was Elsie Williams, a woman of African and Caribbean heritage who had a promising career in the 1920s as a singer and dancer.
Later in life, Williams had an abusive partner and suffered from alcoholism.
In news reports, she was given the racist nickname “snowflake”.
Williams was in and out of courts and prison, mostly for public drunkenness and sometimes theft.
In 1942, she died after falling, or being pushed, into a campfire in Dudley Flats, a homeless camp in West Melbourne.
Reynolds said women were judged harshly for leaving their husbands, or for stealing to survive. He called for compassion and said there was often more to their story.
Reynolds is not painting them as saints, but says they often faced poverty, domestic violence, lack of support and homelessness.
He is writing a book about Tie Cum Ah Chung – a Chinese woman who in the 1920s ran a gambling house in the Little Lon red-light district of Melbourne’s CBD.
He says, of Chung: “The impression I got was of a very smart woman who learned how to game the system, how to use the system.”
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